By the time he stopped writing science fiction in 1989, saying that the new situation of the world, the fall of the communist states, had made his phantasmagoric ideas a reality, Stanislaw Lem, who has died aged 84, was possibly the most popular and widely read science fiction writer in the world, garlanded with many literary, academic and official awards. His books were translated from his native Polish into at least 40 languages, and overall he has, so far, sold some 27 million copies.

The English language was an obstacle to him though, and he remains under-regarded in the west. Yet he did receive widespread attention on this side of the iron curtain following the release in 1972 of Andrei Tarkovsky's film of his best-known novel, Solaris (1961), which was billed (quite inaccurately) as "the Russian 2001".

The story is set on a research station in orbit around Solaris. This mysterious planet possesses a single life form with the power - when challenged - to draw out physical phenomena, simulacrum of human beings from the crew members' unconscious into what appears to be reality. The novel had been translated into English from what Lem described as a poor French edition, and that is the version we still have.

Lem felt the novel was therefore seriously misunderstood. This was also true, he thought, of the Russian film which starred Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk, and he had many arguments with Tarkovsky. As for the American remake of Solaris (2002) with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, he had no discussions with the latter film's director, Steven Soderbergh, at all. He felt it tried to be a romantic story: one tributary in the river basin of the book, as he put it.

The western tradition of science fiction, largely the product of rightwing American writers, is high on individualism, expansionist politics and engineering or military solutions to intransigent problems. By contrast, Lem's writing was largely allegorical, wryly comic, humanistic, anti-military, satirical. He was once described as the modern Voltaire. For these reasons, his books struck a chord in Europe and the Soviet Union, and he became extremely popular. From the mid-1960s onwards he was therefore accorded an unusual amount of freedom of movement and speech. By the standards of the Soviet bloc, he was financially well off for most of his life. Although he moved with his family to Vienna for a few years, during the time of the crackdown against the Polish trade union Solidarity, he never showed any wish to relocate permanently in the west.

Lem was born in Lwów, a city then in Poland, later Lvov in the Soviet Union and now Lviv, in Ukraine. His father was a wealthy laryngologist, and young Stanislaw followed him into medicine. In 1939 Poland was effectively partitioned by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union following the Hitler-Stalin pact and Hitler's invasion of Poland. He was still a medical student when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 - he had Jewish ancestry which meant his security and that of his family was immediately in jeopardy. Lem gave up his studies and found a low-profile job as a mechanic, servicing, repairing and as a matter of course, subtly sabotaging the Germans' vehicles.

In 1944 he was able to resume his medical studies, but never qualified as a doctor. After the end of the second world war, a Stalinist regime, owing its allegiance to Moscow, was installed in Poland. Lem had begun writing while still a student, but he had many years of struggle. His early books were either hack space adventures, published as commercial paperbacks, or more serious works that were forced to conform to the official standards of socialist realism. Lem was apolitical, but it was a way for a young writer to find print. These optimistic portraits of technology and social progress have not been published outside Poland.

In 1955 he published Time is not Lost, a novel about life in Poland under the Nazis. The following year riots signalled the end of the hardline Stalinist regime in Poland and a new, more liberal communist administration, led by Wladyslaw Gomulka, was installed. That too, coincidentally, was the year his career took off. Between then and the end of the 1960s, he produced all his best-known works: Hospital of the Transfiguration (1956), Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), The Invincible (1964), The Cyberiad (1965) and Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968).

None of these was published in English for several years after their first appearance. Solaris (translated in 1970) and The Invincible (1973) both suffered particularly deficient translations. At the same time as he was gaining recognition in his home country - only Arthur C Clarke has enjoyed the same level of formal approbation - Lem wandered inadvertently into conflict with his western colleagues.

In 1973 a club for professional SF authors, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), made him an honorary member. However, Lem soon fell out with some of its famous writers, including Philip K Dick, who was in dispute with his Polish publisher and held Lem responsible. Dick wrote to the FBI, accusing Lem of being a Communist party apparatchik, or perhaps even one of a faceless committee of functionaries, organising a cell that intended to subvert American science fiction. In later years, Lem himself made this letter public, always with the forgiving note that Dick, whose work he admired, was suffering from schizophrenia at the time.

Some of Lem's amused and critical comments about science fiction attitudes, based on offhand comments by American writers he had read in SFWA publications, worked their way back to the US. Even though Lem's remarks were out of context, and badly translated, they were enough. Lem was drummed out of the SFWA forthwith. Some saw parallels with some of the activities of Soviet-era writers' unions, with their suppression of freedom of speech and discipline for disagreeing with the consensus. Whichever way it was viewed, the action brought little credit to the SFWA.

Lem himself said nothing in public, although it is known he felt slighted. Years later he did say to his biographer, J Madison Davis: "It would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers."

At the heart of this dispute was an intrinsic difference of approach. Lem himself resisted the idea of being an SF writer. For instance, he once said of Solaris: "It's about a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner, perhaps, but it's one that cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images." In this way, from Lem's point of view, both film adaptations were inevitably about the wrong things. The American culture of science fiction not only failed to understand him, it never had a chance to. He did not translate well.